Video Card Upgrade?

[lucas122478]

Hey guys im currently in the Philippines for about 6 more months or so. My daughter busted my gaming laptop, and what we got atm, is the intel atom 230 mini-desktop with the intel board. The only available port being a pci port at that. The onboard graphics are obviously horrendous, and my wife likes to play Sims 3 but the speed of the game is pretty pathetic, I was wondering would it be worthwhile to try and track down a PCI vid card to slap into it or just grit and bear it until get back to the states and can put together another computer?

Couple of local computer shops I've spoken with tell me its pointless, yet like I said i'm in the 'pines you can't trust even the priests in this country. It seems to me that by putting a card in it should speed things up a good bit considering the onboard graphics is really just a northbridge so the cpu is the one handling all the load in the games correct?

On top of that the Power supply is 200 watts, yet it being an atom cpu, board, 1 sata hd, 1 dvd/cdrom drive, webcam, 1 external hd 1 2gb ddr2 ram, seriously doubt its pulling more than 40-50 watts, leaving 150 watts excess - so next question would that be enough juice left over for a vid card?

 

[evolucion8]

Atom is a severe bottleneck in current, past and future games. Sims 3 is CPU bound, even my gf's Pentium 4 3.40GHz and a Radeon X1950PRO 256MB and can have some slow downs momentarily regardless of the quality settings. Plus your PCI bus is also a terrible bottleneck. Just get the cheapest GeForce 8 PCI that you can find, or the cheapest ATi Radeon HD 2xxx or 3xxx that you can get.

 

[RussianSensation]

Laptop versions of these chipsets may work, but may run comparatively slower. Standalone cards that are installed in vanilla PCI slots (not PCIe or PCIx or AGP), such as some GeForce FX variants, will perform poorly. http://www.thesims3.com/game/systemreq

The Sims™ 3 Minimum Hardware Requirements
FOR WINDOWS XP

• 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
• 1 GB RAM
• 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
• The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
• Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
• At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB of additional space for custom content and saved games

FOR WINDOWS VISTA

• 2.4 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
• 1.5 GB RAM
• 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
• Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1
• At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB of additional space for custom content and saved games

For computers using built-in graphics chipsets under Windows, the game requires at least:

• Intel Integrated Chipset, GMA 3-Series or above
• 2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent
• 0.5 GB additional RAM

Looks like both your CPU and GPU are too slow.